Surrender

• Author: Bono
• Full Title: Surrender
• Tags: #books
• Recommendation: 9/10. If you like U2, you'll enjoy this book. If you are interested in the minds of artists, you'll like this book. I really enjoyed learning about Bono's life (he even has a regular name! Paul Hewson), particularly that he got married young - early twenties and has 4 kids. Not many rock starts have that to say!

Highlights

• A job is a thing where you do something you don’t really like for eight hours a day for five or six days a week in return for money to help you do the stuff on the weekend you want to do all the time. (Location 225)
• All musical instruments are useful for love and exhortation. Only one is essential for war. The drums. (Location 2503)
• Music for me has always been a lifeline in times of turbulence. It still is. That’s enough to justify its existence; the sacred service of getting a soul from there to here is not to be underestimated. Just giving someone a reason to get out of bed in the morning counts for so much. Music as the love that drives out all fear. Music is its own reason to exist. (Location 3154)
• He showed me, as an Irish person, that ideas get more authority the better they are described. (Location 3162)
• Self-consciousness was the only enemy because if I could be free, then maybe so could our kids. I let them dare and provoke me into some stupid fun, like getting out of the car in the middle of a traffic jam and dancing to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody.” I had some of their moves down, having taken lessons from the girls. It was a time when moments like that achieved permanence only through memory. A time before smartphones made us look stupid. (Location 3641)
• The very idea that your private thoughts or feelings are worth sharing with anyone outside your family or friends is already a kind of arrogance. (Location 3931)
• A key component to greatness is that the work has to answer a deep personal desire to make it. The song you are writing and recording has to be, above all other criteria, a song that you want to hear yourself. (Location 4082)
• It’s an extraordinary thing, the moment of surrender. To get down on your knees and ask the silence to save you, to reveal itself to you. (Location 4477)
• To kneel down, to implore, to throw yourself out into space, to quietly whisper or roar your insignificance. To fall prostrate and ask to be carried. To humble yourself with your family, your bandmates, and to discover if there’s a face or a name to that silence. (Location 4479)
• In fact one of the names of God, El Shaddai, means “the breasted one.” (Location 4531)

• Mentoring is foundation, pillars, and roof of any successful organization. (Location 4609)

• Andy Warhol went to Mass every Sunday and volunteered in New York food kitchens all through his life. He never talked about God, but his first work and his last work were religious. In the art dictionary, you find that pop was about the death of God because if there’s no eternal, then we must live in the instant. But the job of art is making the instant eternal. (Location 5054)
• We have some unconscious desire for performers to have an otherworldliness, to have traveled to that “other world.” We want to see through them. We want them to be our seers. (Location 5327)
• Dr. King, said Harry, had heard enough and adjourned the meeting. “Gentlemen, I’m releasing you into the world to find one positive thing to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that one positive thing will be the door through which our movement will have to pass.” (Location 5963)
• The search for common ground starts with a search for higher ground. Even with your opponents. (Location 5966)
• The simple but profound idea that you don’t have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough. (Location 5968)
• Unlike Europeans, and especially Irish people, Americans are not motivated by attempts to guilt them into action. But offer them the role of the cavalry, and they’re right there with you. (Location 6445)
• even the most cynical of us felt a surge of spirit when we ended the tour at Wheaton College, in part because it was alma mater to so many influential evangelicals, including Mike Gerson, speechwriter for President Bush. (Location 6453)
• “One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.” More power to you. (Location 6956)
• But if the French philosopher Simone Weil is right, that “imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life,” (Location 7016)
• It was the eighteenth-century economist Richard Cantillon, born in County Kerry, who first introduced the modern idea of the “entrepreneur” and suggested it’s someone who takes risks on what they don’t know with what they do know. (Location 7377)
• When I’m feeling uppity I think of myself as an “actualist,” a term I made up…until I found it in the dictionary. An idealist who’s also a pragmatist. (Location 7379)
• Instead, says the writer—maybe Solomon—these are the vanities of vanities. The best thing in life, he discovers, is to enjoy your work. To do what you love. (Location 7976)
• We begin by looking out for our children, and in time, if we are so blessed, we find they are looking out for us. (Location 8009)
• It’s more likely that church is not a place but a practice, and the practice becomes the place. There is no promised land. Only the promised journey, the pilgrimage. We search through the noise for signal, and we learn to ask better questions of ourselves and each other. (Location 8150)
• Carl Jung observed that the very things that made you successful in the first half of your life not only no longer work for you in the second half; they positively work against you. (Location 8348)